Abstract: Brightness induction is the modulation of the perceived intensity of an area by the luminance of surrounding areas and reveals fundamental properties of neural organization in the visual system. Several phenomenological models have been proposed that successfully account for psychophysical data (Pessoa et al. 1995, Blakeslee and McCourt 2004, Barkan et al. 2008, Otazu et al. 2008).
Neurophysiological evidence suggests that brightness information is explicitly represented in V1 and neuronal response modulations have been observed followingluminance changes outside their receptive fields (Rossi and Paradiso, 1999).
In this work we investigate possible neural mechanisms that offer a plausible explanation for such effects. To this end, we consider the model by Z.Li (1999) which is based on biological data and focuses on the part of V1 responsible for contextual influences, namely, layer 2–3 pyramidal cells, interneurons, and horizontal intracortical connections. This model has proven to account for phenomena such as contour detection and preattentive segmentation, which share with brightness induction the relevant effect of contextual influences. In our model, the input to the network is derived from a complete multiscale and multiorientation wavelet decomposition which makes it possible to recover an image reflecting the perceived intensity. The proposed model successfully accounts for well known pyschophysical effects (among them: the White's and modified White's effects, the Todorović, Chevreul, achromatic ring patterns, and grating induction effects). Our work suggests that intra-cortical interactions in the primary visual cortex could partially explain perceptual brightness induction effects and reveals how a common general architecture may account for several different fundamental processes emerging early in the visual pathway.

Abstract: In this work we present an effective and computationally simple algorithm for image compression based on Hilbert Scanning of Embedded quadTrees (Hi-SET). It allows to represent an image as an embedded bitstream along a fractal function. Embedding is an important feature of modern image compression algorithms, in this way Salomon in [1, pg. 614] cite that another feature and perhaps a unique one is the fact of achieving the best quality for the number of bits input by the decoder at any point during the decoding. Hi-SET possesses also this latter feature. Furthermore, the coder is based on a quadtree partition strategy, that applied to image transformation structures such as discrete cosine or wavelet transform allows to obtain an energy clustering both in frequency and space. The coding algorithm is composed of three general steps, using just a list of significant pixels. The implementation of the proposed coder is developed for gray-scale and color image compression. Hi-SET compressed images are, on average, 6.20dB better than the ones obtained by other compression techniques based on the Hilbert scanning. Moreover, Hi-SET improves the image quality in 1.39dB and 1.00dB in gray-scale and color compression, respectively, when compared with JPEG2000 coder.

Abstract: Brightness induction is the modulation of the perceived intensity of an area by the luminance of surrounding areas. From a purely computational perspective, we built a low-level computational model (CIWaM) of early sensory processing based on multi-resolution wavelets with the aim of replicating brightness and colour (Otazu et al., 2010, Journal of Vision, 10(12):5) induction effects. Furthermore, we successfully used the CIWaM architecture to define a computational saliency model (Murray et al, 2011, CVPR, 433-440; Vanrell et al, submitted to AVA/BMVA'12). From a biological perspective, neurophysiological evidence suggests that perceived brightness information may be explicitly represented in V1. In this work we investigate possible neural mechanisms that offer a plausible explanation for such effects. To this end, we consider the model by Z.Li (Li, 1999, Network:Comput. Neural Syst., 10, 187-212) which is based on biological data and focuses on the part of V1 responsible for contextual influences, namely, layer 2-3 pyramidal cells, interneurons, and horizontal intracortical connections. This model has proven to account for phenomena such as visual saliency, which share with brightness induction the relevant effect of contextual influences (the ones modelled by CIWaM). In the proposed model, the input to the network is derived from a complete multiscale and multiorientation wavelet decomposition taken from the computational model (CIWaM).
This model successfully accounts for well known pyschophysical effects (among them: the White's and modied White's effects, the Todorovic, Chevreul, achromatic ring patterns, and grating induction effects) for static contexts and also for brigthness induction in dynamic contexts defined by modulating the luminance of surrounding areas. From a methodological point of view, we conclude that the results obtained by the computational model (CIWaM) are compatible with the ones obtained by the neurodynamical model proposed here.

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to revisit an old theory of texture perception and
update its computational implementation by extending it to colour. With this in mind we try to capture the optimality of perceptual systems. This is achieved in the proposed approach by sharing well-known early stages of the visual processes and extracting low-dimensional features that perfectly encode adequate properties for a large variety of textures without needing further learning stages. We propose several descriptors in a bag-of-words framework that are derived from different quantisation models on to the feature spaces. Our perceptual features are directly given by the shape and colour attributes of image blobs, which are the textons. In this way we avoid learning visual words and directly build the vocabularies on these lowdimensionaltexton spaces. Main differences between proposed descriptors rely on how co-occurrence of blob attributes is represented in the vocabularies. Our approach overcomes current state-of-art in colour texture description which is proved in several experiments on large texture datasets.

Abstract: In the last years, intrinsic image decomposition has gained attention. Most of the state-of-the-art methods are based on the assumption that reflectance changes come along with strong image edges. Recently, user intervention in the recovery problem has proved to be a remarkable source of improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that aims to overcome the shortcomings of pure edge-based methods by introducing strong surface descriptors, such as the color-name descriptor which introduces high-level considerations resembling top-down intervention. We also use a second surface descriptor, termed color-shade, which allows us to include physical considerations derived from the image formation model capturing gradual color surface variations. Both color cues are combined by means of a Markov Random Field. The method is quantitatively tested on the MIT ground truth dataset using different error metrics, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel approach to automatic, yet flexible, image concepttransfer; examples of concepts are “romantic”, “earthy”, and “luscious”. The presented method modifies the color content of an input image given only a concept specified by a user in natural language, thereby requiring minimal user input. This method is particularly useful for users who are aware of the message they wish to convey in the transferred image while being unsure of the color combination needed to achieve the corresponding transfer. Our framework is flexible for two reasons. First, the user may select one of two modalities to map input image chromaticities to target concept chromaticities depending on the level of photo-realism required. Second, the user may adjust the intensity level of the concepttransfer to his/her liking with a single parameter. The proposed method uses a convex clustering algorithm, with a novel pruning mechanism, to automatically set the complexity of models of chromatic content. Results show that our approach yields transferred images which effectively represent concepts as confirmed by a user study.

Abstract: Finding color representations which are stable to illuminant changes is still an open problem in computer vision. Until now most approaches have been based on physical constraints or statistical assumptions derived from the scene, while very little attention has been paid to the effects that selected illuminants have
on the final color image representation. The novelty of this work is to propose
perceptual constraints that are computed on the corrected images. We define the
category hypothesis, which weights the set of feasible illuminants according to their ability to map the corrected image onto specific colors. Here we choose these colors as the universal color categories related to basic linguistic terms which have been psychophysically measured. These color categories encode natural color statistics, and their relevance across different cultures is indicated by the fact that they have received a common color name. From this category hypothesis we propose a fast implementation that allows the sampling of a large set of illuminants. Experiments prove that our method rivals current state-of-art performance without the need for training algorithmic parameters. Additionally, the method can be used as a framework to insert top-down information from other sources, thus opening further research directions in solving for color constancy.

Abstract: State-of-the-art object detectors typically use shape information as a low level feature representation to capture the local structure of an object. This paper shows that early fusion of shape and color, as is popular in image classification,
leads to a significant drop in performance for object detection. Moreover, such approaches also yields suboptimal results for object categories with varying importance of color and shape.
In this paper we propose the use of color attributes as an explicit color representation for object detection. Color attributes are compact, computationally efficient, and when combined with traditional shape features provide state-ofthe-
art results for object detection. Our method is tested on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2009 datasets and results clearly show that our method improves over state-of-the-art techniques despite its simplicity. We also introduce a new dataset consisting of cartoon character images in which color plays a pivotal role. On this dataset, our approach yields a significant gain of 14% in mean AP over conventional state-of-the-art methods.